Sundays are for doing all the work you didn't get to through the week.

No, Sundays are for sitting around feeling guilty that you're not doing all the work you didn't get to through the week.

Sundays are for feeling guilty that all the work you did do during the week merely goes to increasing human misery in the long run.

[Jenny] Are you an estate agent?

[penelope] Teacher, I bet Jenny's a teacher.

Dear 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue' mailing list member, If you are free on the evening of Sunday 29th February, live in the London area and are keen not to miss the final recording of the next series of Barry and Graeme's 'Hamish & Dougal - You'll Have Had Your Tea', you can get free tickets to the show from the BBC Ticket Unit. See details below. All the best (and apologies if you live too far away to come) Jon Naismith & Janet Staplehurst. GET YOUR FREE TICKETS to witness for yourselves the further exploits of Hamish & Dougal in the final recording of the second series of their hilarious Radio 4 comedy “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” starring Barry Cryer and Graeme Garden with Alison Steadman as their housekeeper Mrs Naughtie & Jeremy Hardy as the local Laird. Fans of their many appearances in Radio 4’s “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue”, will be thrilled to hear that Hamish and Dougal, those delightfully eccentric and frequently misunderstood Scotsmen, are to make a second series of their own radio vehicle. For a rollicking laughter-fest and more jokes than you can shake a stick at come to The Cochrane Theatre, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP (nearest tube: Holborn)on Sunday 29th February Doors open 7.15pm - Show starts 7.30pm To claim your free tickets – simply telephone the BBC Ticket Unit on 020 8576 1227 or email radio.ticket.unit@bbc.co.uk or apply online at www.bbc.co.uk/tickets

Not a teacher, I work in educational supplies. But I've rather lost faith in the education system recently.

In my youth, having been a dumpee a few times, I speculated that it was much easier being on the dumping side, since you knew it was coming. When catapaulted into the opposite position, I realised that being dumped is, in fact, considerably simpler, since you didn't know it was coming.

Why do I mention this, you ask? Every so often I'm asked to review papers for academic journals, and until today I've never had cause to recommend a rejection... and for some reason I feel rather bad about doing so. But then, we can't be accused of falling standards now, can we?

[rab] It's what publishers have to do all the time, but still not pleasant to be in the judgement seat. Do you know, or are you likely to meet, this person?

It's not nice to be negative, but then you can't reward bad work, can you?

Or you could reject another - as two negatives make a positive!

[rab] You'll get over it. Consider it a necessary herd-thinning.

[rab] Count yourself lucky that the editors are sending you such good papers. In my field at least, rejection rates in the top journals run 90-95% or so. I certainly have to recommend rejection much more often than acceptance.

[rab] It's positively a public service to see that rubbish doesn't reach print. In the past I've rejected several papers for triviality, several for technical slipshoddery, one for outright crackpottery, and one for unwittingly reproducing (but not as well) some of the results from a certain fundamental paper that hardly anyone has read but everyone cites (including the authors of the rejected paper). I assume your refereeing process is anonymous?

Rab] It is not quite the same thing I know, but I dislike interviewing for the same reason. Up to ten people, probably five of which have high hopes for the job have put in a great deal of time and effort to make themselves presentable and revealed a great deal of personal information about themselves are then put on trial for one position. Nine have to be turned down or 'put on file'. I hate it.

[Btd] Does it work to think instead of the benefit done to not only the successful candidate, but all the other employees of the company (university, etc.) by appointing the right one?

[Btd] My motivator was just that I would have to work with whoever was hired, and I didn't want to have to carry them. But then the last bit of intensive interviewing which I did was for a contractor position, so it was much less about the person and much more about the skills.

[CdM, Raak et al] I agree... The number of times I've read stuff that's been published thinking "How on earth did this get through?" means that, having been hit with something like that there is only one response. I would say more, but I fear any attempt at anonymity would go through the window.

I would be interested in the opinions of fellow posters - I have thought about this from time to time but I don't think that I have actually posted my opinion.  Why, when our User Names are posted in bold type do we insist on then using HTML tags to match the entry?  To me it really does make the entries rather hard to read.  This does not apply only to this site.  Why do we do this to ourselves?

[Dujon] I'm not quite sure that I understand your question - no, actually I am quite sure that I do no understand! What do you mean by "match"?

If you mean "Putting game moves in bold" then the answer is "to make an actual move stand out from any by play and commentary". That's about the only interpretation I can place on your query, but I'm still confused to be honest.

[Dujon] Are you by chance referring to games like Advice, 10,000 Celerity CDs, the various poetry ones, etc. where practically the entire game is written in bold, as opposed to the MC games where having the moves picked out in bold is useful? Would you prefer to see more games take the style of, say, Auckland and 50 Ways, to take two recent examples?

[Dujon] I, too, am slightly unsure precisely what you are asking, but a bit of historical input might be called for. In the early days, there was basically no markup, but this caused a problem as if you simply made the comment "and I reckon we can reach Mornington Crescent in three from here" the game would end. So to prevent this problem, it was decided that the moves should be marked up so the server could work out the actual move made amongst the other text. This has the side-effect that moves are also more obvious to the observer. In non-MC games, early posters seem to set the convention for that game. There seems a general trend towards those games where commentry is inappropriate to be played unemphatically (e.g. Auckland). All this is self-organising however. As to displaying the player name in bold, well, I think it just looks better, and allows you to see more clearly where moves start and end - this is most useful in these chat games. I have a vague recollection that York (at least in its early days) didn't mark up the player name.

I know of someone who apparently used to just take about half the CVs received for consideration and chuck them in the bin, saying "I really don't want to give this job to an unlucky person". Harsh, but amusing.

(cross posted from MCiOS, after spotting that you wanted us to reply here) [Dujon] There is quite often a legit reason for doing this. Sometimes you want to separate your move from your commentary about your move (as in MC games themselves), so you'd tend only to embolden your actual chosen move, and then refer to other stations which are relevant in italics. If you look at the York archives, you'll see this is a practice that grew up over time. The same thing happened with limericks, to enable the submitted line to be distinct from comments (and heaven knows that's always helpful with some of the scansion round 'ere). It's become useful in other context to the extent that it's now hard-wired in the system to a certain extent, with Dan's advice-o-matic looking for material only that's marked up with b tags. So there's a sort of logic at work there. I suppose we could use i tags instead, but I tend to find italic text just that little bit more fiddly to read on screen.

I was referring to the readability of various games. Particularly those where a bold user name is immediately followed by a bold post (which was what I meant - although poorly expressed - by 'matching'.) Given the explanations given by the site owners I now understand that there is a reason for this particular method of operation. I shall now shut up.

* Please ignore the second 'given' *

Well, my damning report is written... just ensuring the English is authentically bad so my tracks are covered.

rab] You are not un-spellchecking the academic journal you have rejected are you? ;o)

[Chalky] Ml rcvd, rpns snt. If it doesn't get through this time then perhaps my mail server doesn't like talking to yours.

[rab] Your mail server likes my inbox :-)

... and [Bob] Is the ISIHaC weekend in May still a runner?

Chalky] Well I hope so. MF sent me some fabulous scripts and there was a great deal of interest initially. I've never been on a pilg and I didn't realised until reading through the posts on Orange that they can be like mini ISIHACs but far less 'organised'. I began to feel like I was being too prescriptive about the whole thing.

The other problem was finding reasonable low-cost accommodation for those staying over. The hotel I first chose quoted £35 per night, but then told me that was per person without breakfast. A twin room with breakfast was priced at £75. Then I tried a pub called 'England’s Rose', 'cos it had real ale, was in a nice location and had lots of rooms and camping space. But when I visited it, it was a full on Princess Diana theme pub and every time I asked how many rooms and what the pricing was I got a different reply. So it was back to the drawing board and now I'm (fortunately) very busy. Fortunately because I've just gone self-employed. I have wondered about a youth hostel - very basic (bring your own sheets/sleeping bag) but very cheap and lots of fun. Any takers?

I'd be happy to stay in a youth hostel. If it's one of those where people share dormitories, though, I'm afraid I have to warn people in advance that I snore...

Keep in mind - they tend to have curfews - and from personal experience, other hostellers can get very grumpy if you're just 5 minutes late finishing off a shower and getting into bed after lights out.

Some hostels are party bookable. I'm looking into that. As for shared rooms, I've never been to one that had private rooms, but that can be part of the fun, snorin' and all. Otherwise - its ears to the ground trying to find a reasonable hotel. Has anyone had any experience of conference or group booking?